So anyone used this?

My parents moved into a new place, no phone-line or ADSL for a couple of weeks so we signed up with Virgin Wireless Broadband to make use of their 30-day satisfaction guarantee (full refund if unhappy for whatever reason), $70 for 4GB/month @ 512/384 kbps, 24-month contract.

My experience: speeds vary from 5 to 50kB/s, which in isolation is fine by me. The killer though is how bloody unreliable it is, despite the fact that the modem claims good to very-good reception. Not only does internet access just stop working for no reason several times a day (modem says "Connected" but no traffic flows, requiring a manual reconnect) with a modem freeze every once in a while, but websites can take bloody ages to access. Just now for qgl.ausforums.com:

DNS lookup: ~5-10 seconds (now cached)
"Connecting": 7 seconds
Page load: 12 seconds
Total: almost 30 seconds

From my understanding, the Wireless router starts in [the slower] UMTS mode when idle and switches to the faster HSDPA mode when you do stuff, giving you a big speed boost. Problem is this causes the massive delays, since I have to wait 10 seconds for the fast mode to become active when I browse. If I consecutively browse before it falls back to the slower mode, the websites load pretty much instantly.

Summary of the Virgin-specific service:

-- Pros --
* Gives you some form of internet access when lacking other options
* Installation very easy
* 30 day refund if unhappy
* Free local phone calls

-- Cons --
* Highly unstable (seemingly widespread problem)
* High latency and page-load delays
* Long contract
* Low quota (despite acceptable speed for video streaming)

We'll be cancelling in a week or two when ADSL is connected. This is just too unstable.

Extra comments:

Virgin seem to be one of the few companies that offer shaping when you go over your quota. Most other companies let you go into excess, charging $100-150/GB! Some of them charge you $1500+/GB if your modem happens to roam onto the slower phone network by itself. Problem is that these companies happen to have all-around better prices and higher quota than Virgin .. so it seems you can't really have the best of both worlds yet :/

Any comments or experiences welcome.

ive set up a couple of pcs using it; (both were no other internets available jobbys)

one using the telstra service, slow as f*** (barely better than dialup) but pretty reliable;

and the new vodafone service down the coast
much faster, but speeds are flakey as (seems to be affected by weather, during all the storms downt he coast, connection would drop back to the real slow service

apparently from the whingepool threads, the vodafone service in brisbane is much more reliable and quick

um, from memory the telstra service was $50 bux a month for 2gig and vodafone is the same price for 5 gig . .. .

last edited by Spook at 13:13:35 21/Jan/08

I am currently using the same service through telstra. No major problems as far as speed/reliability, staying under the cap is the hard part.

Virgin wireless broadband was ok if you where the only person using it. However, you get 3 or 4 people looking at websites and you might as well be using dial up.

We also found that it got disconnected several times a day, generally the several times of the day that you really wanted to do something on the net.

Shad can tell you about the quality of 3G. He loves Telstrait in the ass

I wonder if you can force the modem not to switch to HSPDA, like with 3g/gsm roaming on mobiles (I have three yet park it on Telstra because of the better coverage).

we moved office recently, and just in case internets was delayed by telstra screwing up the phone line provisioning, we got a couple of iburst wireless broadband modems through chilli as a fall-back

needless to say, we had to fall back to using them for a couple of weeks..
they were 1mbit full duplex, one was on a shaped plan the other was excess charged

for what they are, they were pretty good. I wouldn't really like to use them for anything more than a fallback, they dropped out a bit - sometimes a few times a day, then sometimes not for several days. we had one running off a winxp box and the other running under linux

I wonder if you can force the modem not to switch to HSPDA

On the Virgin router you can either select GPRS or UMTS/HSDPA or Auto. Can't specify any further.

With UMTS, I get very s*** performance. The net only works properly when it's on HSDPA, so I'd prefer to force it to use HSDPA always in my situation .. too bad there is no option to do so!